Monday 14 July 2014 09.44 EDT
First published on Monday 14 July 2014 09.44 EDT

Susan Glaspell's 1916 feminist short play Trifles is like finely stitched linen: delicate but tough. Farmer John Wright is dead and his wife is held in the town jail on suspicion of his murder. The sheriff, Peters, and his deputies return to the farmstead to look for clues with Mrs Peters, and the female neighbour who discovered the body, in tow. The men blunder around, leaving the two women in the kitchen, a place that is of no interest to the sheriff because it is the domain of women. But, of course, that is where the solution to the mystery is to be found.

Glaspell's exquisitely understated and poignant drama raises the performance level and the star-rating of this misconceived evening of American plays performed by a talented all-female ensemble, and subtitled "snapshots of life behind closed doors". Presumably the closed doors refer to American family life, but the links between these pieces remain tenuous, both thematically and stylistically. An ungainly design, which requires a hiatus between the first and second plays, does little to create a sense of cohesion.

Philip Dawkins's Cast of Characters has the air of a playwriting exercise, as a gaggle of actors read the cast list for a family drama of entwined lives (that we never actually get to see, for which we must be thankful), while the playwright makes interruptions to clarify intentions. It may have edge in a snappier, sharper production than it gets here, but the overall effect is of facetiousness.

Cast of Characters draws attention to the ties that bind while playing on the absurdities of realism. Brooke Allen's slushy tragedy The Deer, about the relationship between a drifting sister and her brother, also requires something more heightened. Alas, it's only hinted at in Jack Thorpe-Baker's production, as a human and a deer find themselves eyeball to eyeball in death on an icy road.